WASHINGTON (AFP) – A scan of brain activity can effectively read a person’s mind, researchers said Thursday.
British scientists from University College London found they could differentiate brain activity linked to different memories and thereby identify thought patterns by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
The evidence suggests researchers can tell which memory of a past event a person is recalling from the pattern of their brain activity alone.
“We’ve been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory — to look at actual memory traces,” said senior author of the study, Eleanor Maguire.
“We found that our memories are definitely represented in the hippocampus. Now that we’ve seen where they are, we have an opportunity to understand how memories are stored and how they may change through time.”
The results, reported in the March 11 online edition of Current Biology, follow an earlier discovery by the same team that they could tell where a person was standing within a virtual reality room in the same way.
The researchers say the new results move this line of research along because episodic memories — recollections of everyday events — are expected to be more complex, and thus more difficult to crack than spatial memory.
Neuroscience has learned much about the brain’s activity and its link to certain thoughts. As Lesley Stahl reports, it may now be possible, on a basic level, to read a person’s mind.
SOUTH Australian scientists have worked out how to read minds.
While there are products on the market that claim to interpret thought, they actually just monitor tiny muscle twitches.
But the Flinders Artificial Intelligence Laboratory can now read the signals from neurons firing within the human brain with a Brain Computer Interface.
It reads brainwaves, bypassing the central nervous system altogether, and can ignore “background thoughts” and focus on thoughts that require action. The technology will one day allow people with disabilities to drive wheelchairs with their minds.
At the World Science Festival this week, indications that brain scanners may soon uncover your private thoughts
By Brooke Borel
06.12.2009
Neuroscientists are already able to read some basic thoughts, like whether an individual test subject is looking at a picture of a cat or an image with a specific left or right orientation. They can even read pictures that you’re simply imagining in your mind’s eye. Even leaders in the field are shocked by how far we’ve come in our ability to peer into people’s minds. Will brain scans of the future be able to tell if a person is lying or telling the truth? Suggest whether a consumer wants to buy a car? Reveal our secret likes and dislikes, or our hidden prejudices? While we aren’t there yet, these possibilities have dramatic social, legal and ethical implications.
Twitter messages are so short — a 140-character limit — that you have to really think about what you want to say.
For Adam Wilson, thinking is all he has to do.
Earlier this month, Wilson thought of a tweet (the name for a post to the social networking site) and poof, his computer read his mind and sent the darn thing. At just 23 characters, Wilson’s message, “using EEG to send tweet,” was done with a computer setup that interprets brain waves.
Now it may be impossible for even the best liars to conceal their crimes.
The latest technology in forensic science uses details known only to investigators and the criminal to prove a suspect’s guilt or innocence. Developed by Harvard-trained Lawrence Farwell, brain fingerprinting uses brainwaves to measure what Farwell calls the “a-ha” of recognition.
Traditional lie detectors rely on reading emotional reactions such as sweating or heart rate as a suspect is asked questions. The problem is that well-practiced liars can control these reactions before the polygraph has a chance to detect them.
Canadian scientists develop new “mind-reading” technology
A new method of scanning the brain with near-infrared light – developed by Canadian researchers – can be used to predict a person’s preferences with a high degree of accuracy, by reading the subject’s mind directly. The technology could enable severely disabled persons — unable to move or talk — to express themselves.
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